A Hope in the Unseen (23 page)

It’s a total defeat. Gilliam crumbles under Barbara’s moral force, and she feels some guilty satisfaction.

“I’m sorry …. I just didn’t think there was any harm to it,” he says, and, a moment later, the phones are returned to their cradles.

She looks over at Lavar, who happened to be in the kitchen when the phone rang and has been wandering in and out of the vicinity throughout the conversation. He just nods, saying that “it was no big deal or anything” in a toneless voice that seems practiced to reveal nothing.

On Cedric’s eighteenth birthday, July 24, they eat takeout spare ribs—a rare treat. There has been no other fanfare for the birthday. Cedric mentioned it in passing to people at work, but there was no cake or anything. Barbara has never been much to fuss over birthdays, so the ribs will suffice.

As the days until his departure grow few, Barbara has been mindful to steer conversations toward loose ends—things Cedric may need to know when she’s not there. Cedric, anxious about what’s ahead, helps her along with a steady stream of questions and requests.

“My last wish,” he says, gnawing on a rib, “is I want to be driven to college in an Infiniti. A Q45. I love the Q45. How much can it cost to rent one? You can attach a U-haul on the back.”

She smirks at him. “Next summer, when you’re working at Price Waterhouse again, you can rent an Infiniti and drive around all summer if you want. On my money, we renting a plain ol’ minivan.”

The conversation crests this way and that, but the theme of money rises again to the surface, as it often does. “Someday, when you’re a man,” she says absently, “you’ll be paying your own way with no problem.”

“I’m a man.”

She puts down the rib. “What did I tell you a man was?”

“What?”

“A man,” she says, like reciting a mantra, “takes care of himself physically, financially, and spiritually. And I mean, TOTALLY. Nobody else helping.”

“I take care,” he says, venturing onto uneven terrain.

“Not financially you don’t, not yet.”

Barbara gets up for a glass of water as Cedric picks through a mountain of rib bones, piled in the middle of the table on the takeout bag. She knows he’s anxious for her to finally concede that he’s a man, but she’s in no rush. That he still relies on her for that affirmation is among her most valuable assets, something she’s won, she feels, by mixing her affection with real firmness, by not giving approval or praise unless it’s warranted. Sometimes she worries that he’ll seek proof of his manhood elsewhere. But not often. He wants
her
to say he’s a man, and she’ll say it when he’s earned it. Not a second before.

The TV is blaring, as usual, offering a ready partner if either needs to momentarily turn away from the exhausting, heart-pricking thrust and parry that sometimes passes for conversation in this cramped apartment.

When they pick up the thread again, Barbara offers a bit of conciliatory praise, about how Sister Sharp, one of her fellow missionaries, told her at church last Sunday that “you were very mannerly. ‘I don’t know what he does at home,’ she said to me, ‘but he has very good manners. You done a good job.’

“And, what I told her, Lavar, is that ‘when a child knows right from wrong, you don’t have to worry about him. And the way they learn is by being told in a way that they really listen. You tell them once and back it up, so you don’t have to tell him twice.’”

Cedric moves the conversation over to the Sharp girls, two beautiful, leggy sisters—children of a police detective—who are both flourishing at the University of Maryland.

“Yes, they’re peacocks. Lavar, I seen you watch the way they walk and everything. Any man would watch. Attraction like that often leads to other things, to a man making a fool of himself.”

Cedric fidgets in his chair. They’ve stumbled into the eye of the storm—the issues of love, sex, and marriage—and the two of them just stare at each other. “So,” he says, moving first, “how do you know what love is?”

“Well, you know because you can be yourself with that person.”

“Okay, but how would you know it’s not just lust?”

“’Cause if it’s love, Lavar, you won’t want to sleep with the person. You understand, it’s too precious a thing for that. You need to know who you are and you need to know who they are. And that’s enough. Really knowing another person of the other sex can be very exciting.”

Barbara has run these lines through her head many times, figuring Cedric would eventually press her on the subject and sort of hoping he would. But, wading in, she realizes she’s on anything but firm ground. Looking at him intently across the table, she knows that she can’t recall much about the urgent issues of an eighteen-year-old boy. She has little idea what’s really going on in her son’s head.

The air suddenly seems heavy, and they both turn and watch a few moments of TV. When Cedric starts up again, it’s with a diversion: “You know, I’m never gonna fall in love.”

“What you saying, fool?”

“I just want to be by myself,” he says, clearly playing. “Maybe I’ll just adopt some kids.”

She can play, too, though she’s not as clever as he is at coy asides and misdirection. “All right, then,” she retorts, “how would you take care of kids while you work? Think about that.”

“I don’t know. I’d hire a nanny.”

She laughs. “No, Lavar, you’d send them off on a train to D.C. for me to take care of, a long train ride, ’cause you won’t be here. You ain’t coming back here.”

She’s not sure how she ended up here, but the light banter somehow brought her to the central issue of her future: will he leave forever? But he dodges it. There seems to be something else on his mind.

“All right then, Ms. Jennings,” Cedric says, theatrically. “I must have forgotten to ask you something in our discussion of a few minutes ago …. Have you ever been in love?”

She stops, startled. He’s been drafting her on the curve and just blew by on the home stretch. She stares at him a moment, as a thousand scenes run through her head, racing backward until she sees herself sitting in a hunter green Cordoba, sunk deep in Corinthian leather. She looks down.

“I thought I was,” Barbara Jennings says, barely audible. “I thought I was, once.”

I
n summer, walking any street in the Shaw neighborhood, on the impoverished fringe of Northwest Washington, is to weave by kitchen chairs tucked into the narrow shadow of buildings. People sit in clusters and talk and swelter. Around here, the inside of almost every home is unbearable, the outside just a bit better. Except at Scripture Cathedral, a dark, cool cave—the only air-conditioned refuge in sight.

All of which helps make for a
very
healthy crowd this Sunday August morning, Bishop Long thinks, as he gazes out from his comfy wing on the stage.

As the choir finishes up a haunting rendition of “I’m Gonna Make It,” Long scans the transfixed crowd—close to five hundred today—and muses that he already has “made it.” Then he shakes his head, cutting it off. He considers such feelings a dangerous strain of self-satisfaction, something God would want him to resist. He is only God’s vessel, after all. But the splendor all around is sometimes hard to overlook.

By the summer of 1995, Bishop Long has built a small empire, stretching from the newly refurbished cathedral to his loyal, protective staff, his daily radio show, his TV choir on local cable, and a growing operation that produces pamphlets, tapes, and related religious product lines. Still, there’s plenty left for good works, charity, and outreach, with programs for feeding the poor, drug treatment, literacy and adult education classes, day care, and shelters for the homeless.

Not that he’s avoided controversy. Bishop Long’s comfortable house in Mitchellville, Maryland; his Cadillacs; his finely cut suits; some nearly destitute members of his flock giving their last dime—these drew a few nasty TV broadcasts a few years back, full of unholy cliches. He said it would blow over—and it did—though his competitor clergymen, out of jealousy mostly, sometimes bring it up.

Let them, he thinks, as his foot taps to the music. Why should he be denied a comfortable existence? He works long and hard, and he’s saving lives—literally. Judges remand young defendants to his authority. Principals beg him to walk the halls of their schools. He provides a fully
formed, self-supporting alternative to the streets, a place a kid can retreat to after school each day and practically all weekend.

“Pop, Pop with Jesus! Pop, Pop with Jesus!” the choir belts out, swaying and stomping, as Long picks up the rhythm and absently claps along. He’ll be preaching in a few minutes, so he begins his preparations: looking across the faces in the pews—a thousand life stories he knows by heart—trying to connect, to feel their energy.

The time has come to preach the gospel. He rises, slowly and dramatically, from the chair. Rather than his usual dark suit, today he is resplendent in one of his bishop outfits, a pearl-white robe with blue and yellow tassels and a small, cardinal-style cap.

He greets the flock with a casual smile and makes a few announcements about upcoming events, which is easier to do now than after he’s been yelling and sweating for a few hours. Today is Women’s Day, a special day of appreciation for the church’s bulwark. While Long and his phalanx of dark-suited men are clearly in charge, this is mostly a place for young children and their single mothers—the fierce churchwomen, who do most of the work around here.

Since the beginning of the year, the women have organized countless activities to build unity and, as always, raise money. Later today, he tells them, the top woman fund-raiser will be honored with a queen-for-a-day ceremony, where she’ll get a plastic crown and bouquet of roses, toiletries and perfumes, and a free, four-day, round trip excursion to Powerfest, a convention of Pentecostal ministries that will be held a few weeks from now in Virginia.

“All of you women do so much for us here,” he says, grinning coyly, telegraphing some levity, “that I’d take you all out for dinner if I could. But it’d bankrupt me—looks like some of you ladies can really eat.”

He gets hearty, self-aware laughs from the female infantry—always a nice way to start things off—and then Long cracks his white-leather monogrammed Bible at the bookmark: “Thus the Lord says unto you, ‘Be not afraid or dismayed by reason of this great multitude, for the battle is not yours, but God’s.’”

And he starts spinning it.

“You may not have a battle with ships of war—like the ancient folks had in this passage from the Bible—but YOU have a combat, YOU have a struggle. Some of you have battles at your home! With your children! With your husband! Battles on your job, with your boss!

“But the battle is not yours, the battle is God’s … HALLELUJAH! But before the battle can become that of God, you’ve got to give it to Him—as long as you’re fighting the battle, He won’t fight. The Lord has learned how to stay out of battles, unless you give it to Him. Unless you step aside and say, ‘It’s in God’s hands.’

“Don’t look at the problem and try to figure it out! Look up, look up to God! That’s where the answers are ….”

Long stops, mops his brow, and looks out. It’s important that today’s sermon offer pointed lessons to certain people in the room. He needs to know where those people are sitting, so—at the right moment—he can seem to yell right in their ear. He browses the rows of faces until he spots Cedric Jennings: tenth row, right side.

Cedric is one of Long’s favorites, along with his mother—been that way since early on. And Bishop knows that today is one of Cedric’s last days in church before he leaves for college—for Brown University. The Ivy League is a rarity for a young person from Scripture, and Long hopes it will be seen as a blazing testimony to faith.

He takes a deep breath, launches forward for another half-hour, piling one rhythmic line on the next, ending each with a “HAH,” as much punctuation as respiration. “Some of us have battles going on in our mind, because Satan shoots for the mind. HAH! That’s why Jesus said, ‘I will keep them in perfect peace if they keep their mind stayed on Me.’ HAH!”

Then he stops so abruptly that his voice seems to echo. The choir comes up again, on Long’s cue, and begins singing, “Give Your Problems to God,” giving him a precious few minutes to think about his finale. This is one of the most challenging finishes of any sermon of the year: the tricky, off-to-college speech, one moment when a crack in the church’s foundation gets revealed.

The problem stems from a conundrum he’s thought through a thousand times. Worldly success—the kind of genuine, respect-in-the-community, house-in-the-suburbs achievement that he finds among his
neighbors in middle-class Mitchellville—has never fit well inside the doors of Scripture. And going to college is a first step on that path away from here.

The natural recruits for his brand of fiery Pentecostalism are not those who have gone to college or are expecting to. Rather, they are people at the bottom, who don’t know where the path to status, credential, and material gain even
begins
. In his heart, Long knows he mostly gives them a starting point, a place of retreat where they can figure out who they are. Here, at least, they can hand over their already cheapened lives to faith. It helps plenty of them get on the right track and eventually get a little something for themselves—a steady job, maybe even a house. And they remain faithful members, contributors, and true believers as long as they attribute any forward motion—completely and utterly!—to the mysteries of faith.